One of the most rapidly expanding aspects of wireless networking involves the accessing of information content over wireless networks via web-enabled mobile devices. Examples of such devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), palmtop computers, etc. As is well-known, these and other web-enabled devices not only provide access to the Internet, but can also be used to support other types of wireless networking functionality, such as messaging, distributed collaboration, and location-based services.
An important challenge in this context relates to facilitating the process of creating, publishing, distributing or otherwise managing information content so as to provide optimal presentation consistent with the limited display space and navigational capabilities of typical mobile devices. Many users, for example, may wish to make specific personalized information content available via mobile devices to their friends, colleagues, subscribers or other entities. However, conventional techniques have been unable to meet this need in a satisfactory manner. By way of example, conventional techniques such as web site authoring tools and web logging (“blogging”) are not optimized for use in the generation of information content for shared access via mobile devices.
These and other conventional techniques suffer from a number of significant drawbacks, including a failure to provide suitable integration of messaging, collaboration, location-based services or other wireless networking functionality with the generation of shared information content. As a result, it is generally not possible for different mobile device users to link to and take further action on a persistent version of a given set of shared information content. The conventional techniques thus fail to provide a mechanism that facilitates uniform, action-driven content access and associated user interaction via wireless networks. Also, such techniques generally require a significant amount of programming knowledge for their proper use, and are therefore not suitable for relatively unsophisticated users.
Accordingly, a need exists for improved techniques for managing information content in a manner that overcomes one or more of the drawbacks of the conventional techniques described above.